But listening to the news, my daughter has only heard harsh descriptors of Castro, like “dictator” and “brutal,” on a loop. I tell her that’s not the story, at least not the whole of it. I tell her I cannot speak to the witness of those who left Cuba following the revolution. I wasn’t even born then, I say. It’s possible for there to be more than a single truth, I say, and explain that I will speak to what I know.

Did he kill people, she asks, and I tell her, he did, which is hard for her to hear. Nisa, my daughter, is a young woman who hates guns and fighting and in general, conflict. I don’t know a revolution, with perhaps the singular exception of Maurice Bishop in Grenada, in which the leader of the revolution didn’t execute or have executed those who stood in opposition. Although it’s also true that he was executed by U.S. backed rebels two years into his Cuba-inspired New Jewel Movement.

And how many Africans were enslaved in order to support the build out of the nation? I ask her how many of our bones do we walk on each day, how much of our blood is in America’s soil?

How many died in the Civil War?

How many Mexicans to expand the nation? How many Chinese?

How many young men of every single race do battle in how many countries? How many in Iraq for weapons never manifested? How many more? Who holds the heights when it comes to killings, I respond, in the name of its nation?

But the most important question for her to consider is, what does a human-centered society look like on her watch? I remind her she is part of a Black woman birthed, Queer-led, non-patriarchal and decentralized movement called Black Lives Matter, which is to say that the most important inquiry of all is what revolution can she envision? What tools will she pull together? I ask her how much love, how much hope, how much different would the revolution look if it were imagined by her, my beloved daughter?

Asha Bandele is an award-winning author and journalist. Follow her on Twitter.